I've never played a game from Valve before so I don't know how well Steam works on Windows Vista. Does it play nice by Windows' rules? Is the drm system invasive? Does it need to run in the background all the time?
I saw a couple of screenshots of Team Fortress 2 yesterday and I might be tempted to buy it.

Steam contains no built-in DRM, it's just a distribution system. It's up to the individual games themselves to include whatever copy protection they want, but Steam kind of makes copy-protection pointless since the Game Cache Files are freely distributed
(just encrypted).

I have several Steam games installed, and I've been running Steam and Vista together since Vista launched. I've had no problems at all, and DirectX-based games (Source engine) actually seemed to improve in performance when I switched from XP to Vista.
Steam isn't Aero-enabled, but it doesn't force the system to switch to Vista Basic's color scheme, either.

The DRM system works well, and it's not too invasive. You can sign into your account from any computer that has Steam installed, and it will download the necessary files for you to play the games on your account. You can make CD/DVD backups of the titles
you've purchased. And you only need to run Steam when you want to run a game you've purchased with it, so it doesn't need to be running all the time, like at system startup. There are no background processes associated with the program when it's not running,
as with iTunes.

The latest build of Steam introduced some really nice community features and a great in-game UI, as well. And the game selection is incredible. I say go for it, you won't be disappointed.

Within the last week, I was prompted to install a special Vista-only Steam service.

The official company story goes something like this... Some games sold on Steam assume the user runs as an administrator and will try to write to Program Files, HKLM registry keys, and such. This Steam service runs as Administrator and will broker requests
to do admin tasks, eliminating UAC "annoyances". Steam assures everyone that this service can only provide a limited number of tasks and isn't a cart blanche mechanism for Admin access on your machine. They claim the service starts and stops with Steam (I
haven't verified it).

Overall, seems kind of like a dumb idea that breaks the whole concept of UAC, but basically their response is that stuff might start silently failing on Steam if you don't do it, so I installed it, but I'm not happy about it.

Other than this, I've had no problems on Steam except one. I installed the Bioshock demo a few weeks ago and removed it this past week. It's gone from the Steam game list, but for some reason it showed up in the Vista incarnation of Add/Remove programs. When
I click remove from that menu, it just launches Steam and doesn't do anything, so I can't figure out how to get these entries off the Add/Remove programs list.

I don't know what its like on Vista but it sure is a the biggest pile of slow steaming piece of memory hogging junk ever built just to play some games! .. you ever tried exiting that infestation it takes just as long as it does starting up the last thing
I would do is have that thing starting up at boot with XP.

I refused to stick in whatever it wanted, and Half Life 2 still works for me. Dunno what they claim steam needs admin privileges for (except maybe for badly written games, but, they should just raise the bar on the software that they allow to be distributed
through their service.)

I have a steam account, but forgot about it for a while now.
This thread reminded me that I have some new games to play (If I ever get some free time).

Does anyone know how to look up my steam account name?
I don't even remember the email address I used and my credit card has since been reissued, so I don't have the original numbers from the credit card either.

I have a steam account, but forgot about it for a while now.
This thread reminded me that I have some new games to play (If I ever get some free time).

Does anyone know how to look up my steam account name?
I don't even remember the email address I used and my credit card has since been reissued, so I don't have the original numbers from the credit card either.

If you don't know the username you used you're stuck unless you can find the e-mail that they sent you after they received your payment. It won't have the password in it but it will at least have the username.

You going to have to install Steam (if you don't already have it) and try guessing your username and password.

I have a steam account, but forgot about it for a while now.
This thread reminded me that I have some new games to play (If I ever get some free time).

Does anyone know how to look up my steam account name?
I don't even remember the email address I used and my credit card has since been reissued, so I don't have the original numbers from the credit card either.

If you don't know the username you used you're stuck unless you can find the e-mail that they sent you after they received your payment. It won't have the password in it but it will at least have the username.

You going to have to install Steam (if you don't already have it) and try guessing your username and password.

Arrgh! Thanks.

I have all my outlook .pst backups for the last 7 years, so it's just a matter of loading them up one by one, and searching through the 10,000 received emails in each backup until I find that one.